protonscr

Game recording export slow

steamopen
ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#11622 · opened 2025-01-01 by HarlemSquirrel · updated 2026-01-03 · 2 comments · github
HHarlemSquirrel 2025-01-01 github

Your system information

  • Steam client version (build number or date): 1733265492
  • Distribution (e.g. Ubuntu): ArchLinux
  • Opted into Steam client beta?: [Yes/No] No
  • Have you checked for system updates?: [Yes/No] Yes
  • Steam Logs: [generate by running this command in a terminal tar -zcvf ~/Desktop/steam-logs.tar.gz ~/.steam/steam/logs]
  • GPU: AMD AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

Describe what you expected should happen and what did happen. Please link any large code pastes as a Github Gist

Exporting long game recordings takes 30+ minutes. Recently, a high quality 23 minute 39 second recording at 1440p took nearly 33 minutes to complete.
steam-logs.tar.gz

[2025-01-01 13:55:04][7446.715675] [export] Completed for file (2061083ms): /home/hs/Videos/clip_1,735,755,636,507.mp4

I have GPU hardware encoding enabled and can see ENC using in nvtop as shown in this screenshot:

image

A friend's recording running at a similar resolution for the same length of time exports in just a few minutes on Windows with lesser GPU.

Steps for reproducing this issue:

  1. Make a game recording that's 20 to 30 minutes long
  2. Initiate export to file without any cuts
  3. Wait 30+ minutes
  4. See export time in ~/.local/share/Steam/logs/streaming_log.txt log file
Hhronro 2025-03-24 github

It seems Steam is re-encoding those clips that are already encoded while recording. Why can't Steam just simply remux those clips instead?

Hhowdev 2026-01-03 github

Even when steam re-encode while exporting, it still does not explain the unusually long export time.
You can try re-encode the same exported file in ffmpeg and it only took 20s not minutes in my case

Nothing extracted yet.